My Dear Friend,--Mr. Charles Sumner, a lawyer of high standing
for his age, and editor or one editor of a journal called _The
Jurist,_ and withal a lover of your writings, tells me he is
going to Paris and thence to London, and sets out in a few days.
I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor
let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be
with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate
new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still
like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your
friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing
_Sartor_ themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller.
Instantly I wondered why I had never such a thought before, and
went straight to Boston, and have made a bargain with a
bookseller to print the _French Revolution._ It is to be printed
in two volumes of the size of our American _Sartor,_ one thousand
copies, the estimate making the cost of the book say (in dollars
and cents) $1.18 a copy, and the price $2.50. The bookseller
contracts with me to sell the book at a commission of twenty
percent on that selling price, allowing me however to take at
cost as many copies as I can find subscribers for. There is yet,
I believe, no other copy in the country than mine: so I gave him
the first volume, and the printing is begun. I shall take
care that your friends here shall know my contract with the
bookseller, and so shall give me their names. Then, if so good a
book can have a tolerable sale, (almost contrary to the nature of
a good book, I know,) I shall sustain with great glee the new
relation of being your banker and attorney. They have had the
wit in the London _Examiner,_ I find, to praise at last; and I
mean that our public shall have the entire benefit of that page.
The _Westminster_ they can read themselves. The printers think
they can get the book out by Christmas. So it must be long
before I can tell you what cheer. Meantime do you tell me, I
entreat you, what speed it has had at home. The best, I hope,
with the wise and good withal.
I have nothing to tell you and no thoughts. I have promised a
course of Lectures for December, and am far from knowing what I
am to say; but the way to make sure of fighting into the new
continent is to burn your ships. The "tender ears," as George
Fox said, of young men are always an effectual call to me
ignorant to speak. I find myself so much more and freer on the
platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit, that I shall not
much more use the last; and do now only in a little country
chapel at the request of simple men to whom I sustain no other
relation than that of preacher. But I preach in the Lecture-Room
and then it tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh,
weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius. It
is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern
countrymen. This winter, in Boston, we shall have more than
ever: two or three every night of the week. When will you come
and redeem your pledge? The day before yesterday my little boy
was a year old,--no, the day before that,--and I cannot tell you
what delight and what study I find in this little bud of God,
which I heartily desire you also should see. Good, wise, kind
friend, I shall see you one day. Let me hear, when you can
write, that Mrs. Carlyle is well again.
--R. Waldo Emerson